Moto G Stylus (2025) Hands-On: A Taste of AI at a Lower Price

The new Stylus is bringing some of the bigger AI features we’ve seen to a much lower price.

Mike Sorrentino Senior Editor

Mike Sorrentino is a Senior Editor for Mobile, covering phones, texting apps and smartwatches — obsessing about how we can make the most of them. Mike also keeps an eye out on the movie and toy industry, and outside of work enjoys biking and pizza making.

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Motorola’s 2025 Moto G Stylus might be the new gateway device for trying out AI. I spent a day so far testing the new $400 phone, and it’s quite nice to have access to features that have so far remained limited to more expensive devices.

When the phone was announced last week, I was particularly happy to see 68-watt wired fast charging, which is well within the charging speeds I usually see on more expensive OnePlus phones and gaming phones from Asus and RedMagic. After draining the battery to zero and plugging it into an 80-watt wired charger, the 5,000-mAh battery recharged to 74% in 30 minutes. That’s easily the fastest charging speed I’ve seen for a phone under $500.

I’ve also been playing with Moto AI capabilities like a Sketch to Image feature that’s built into the Notes app, as well as Google’s Circle to Search. The Gemini assistant is also available by default, but, at least for now, can be swapped with the Google Assistant.

With Sketch to Image, I did my best to draw a cat photo. I’ll be honest, my drawing was horrendous. But after tapping Generate, the phone was able to decipher my creation, and swapped out my scribbles with a cat that looks like it came out of a clip art gallery.

The Moto AI features included on the Stylus aren’t as full-fledged as those found on more expensive Samsung Galaxy phones, but they can still help level up your mobile experience. For example, Motorola’s AI can make low-light photos look clearer and brighter.

In a quick initial camera test, I took the phone to a bar and snapped photos of my beer. The result was quite impressive; the camera boosted the exposure in the dark environment while still retaining the fact that it was a dim bar.

Focusing the 50-megapixel main camera on the beer glass, the photo does a good job capturing the suds of my drink along the cup, as well as its amber color. While the background gets blurred, I’m also impressed that it caught the braids of my dark power cord in the bottom right of the frame, which would be an easy miss on a camera included in a lower-priced phone.

Moving my phone back to take a wider shot, the camera also captured a few of the flowers that were closer to me but blurred out some that were facing the other way. A lot of the smaller reflections on the glass, including light distortions created by the glass, made it into the photo. The 50-megapixel main camera is accompanied by a 13-megapixel ultrawide, which I’ll still need to test out as I continue to use this phone.

The 32-megapixel front-facing camera is also noteworthy, especially in a dim bar. I purposely took the photo with the flash off, and am impressed that it still captures the strands of my hair with minimal blending into the shadows in the background. A lot of my skin details also make it in, but there is noticeable image noise around me — likely due to the low light setting.

I’m still testing the Moto G Stylus, but these are just the top highlights, among other features I’m glad to see finally make their way down to a $400 phone. The feature set makes it quite comparable to the rival $400 Samsung Galaxy A36, but Samsung doesn’t provide that phone with Galaxy AI features at the level of Sketch to Image — those are instead found in the $650 Galaxy S24 FE. 

That said, both phones can access Google AI features like Circle to Search. However, as I lamented in the announcement of the Stylus, Motorola’s providing only two years of software updates and three years of security updates. Meanwhile, the Galaxy A36 will get double the overall support, with Samsung promising a six-year timeline for software and security updates.

I’m excited to continue testing these phones, but it may very well be that your choice for a good $400 phone might come down to better software features or longer software support.

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